David Goodway’s Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward

This well informed and clearly written book has two main aims: to tell the reader about the importance and extent of the tradition of anarchist or left-libertarian writing in Britain; and to argue for the urgent relevance today of that tradition of political thought, particularly in its pacifist and environmentalist forms. The latter aim is necessarily the more difficult to fulfil, since it may well come up against the reader’s existing political prejudices or commitments; and I will consider it later. But in that it provides a great deal of information in a form that is both accessible and suggestive of the importance of the tradition discussed, the book is undoubtedly successful. Eight writers classified by Goodway as anarchists are discussed at length, in historical order as follows: Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, John Cowper Powys, Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley, Alex Comfort, Christopher Pallis and Colin Ward. In addition, Goodway offers thoughtful readings here of three other writers broadly sympathetic to the anarchist tradition, but with more reservations about it: William Morris, George Orwell and E. P. Thompson. Each writer is carefully placed in his historical context: Morris in that of late-Victorian radicalism; Orwell that of Spain and the Civil War; and Thompson in that of nuclear disarmament and the ‘New Left’.